Persuasive disciples, not anarchic disrupters

George Weigel

3/15/17

We are living through a dangerous moment in our national life, of
an intensity and potential for destruction unseen since 1968. Then, a teenager,
I watched U.S. Army tanks patrol the streets of Baltimore around the
African-American parish where I worked. Now, a Medicare card carrier, I’m just
as concerned about the fragility of the Republic and the rule of law.

A uniquely vile presidential campaign has been followed by
post-election rejectionism that conjures up images of 1860. Electoral
refuseniks who cannot abide the verdict rendered Nov. 8 put on a vile display
in Washington the day of the inauguration — and this despite President Obama’s
plea for civility and a dignified transfer of power. The new administration has
not helped matters with its own tendency toward raw-meat rhetoric, seemingly
aimed at keeping its electoral base in a state of permanent outrage.

In today’s deeply divided America, the public debate is too often
being framed by those who substitute invective for argument while demonstrating
a visceral contempt for normal democratic political and legal process. Unless
reason reasserts itself over passion, the potential for short term chaos is
great and the risk of long-term damage even greater: an ongoing cycle of
resentment, bitterness and revenge that will lead to more of the gratuitous
violence that was seen on the streets of Washington this past Jan. 20.

Americans once knew a different way. In the 1950s and early
1960s, the civil rights movement promoted, not rage and disruption, but
nonviolent civil disobedience, accepting the penalties imposed under what
protesters deemed unjust laws in order to awaken consciences to the injustice
of those laws. The canonical text here is Martin Luther King Jr.’s brilliant Letter from Birmingham Jail. In it, King married a
Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action to Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of
the relationship of moral law to civil law, calmly but forcefully explaining
his cause and his actions to skeptical fellow clergymen who were critical of
his methods.

The Letter is thoughtful, measured
and well worth rereading — not least because some religious leaders today are
taking an opposite tack. These leaders may imagine that their calls for
“disruption,” of the sort Saul Alinsky described in Rules
for Radicals, stand in continuity with King’s Letter
from Birmingham Jail. They do not. They appeal to outrage, not to the
people’s instinct for justice. They risk little or nothing, whereas King risked
everything.

Their program, such as it is, calls for resistance and defiance
rather than correction and civic renewal. There is little in their message
about “dialogue,” a key theme of Pope Francis; but there is a lot of hot
rhetoric about impeding the enforcement of laws, in terms weirdly reminiscent
of the states-rights or “nullification” theory of John C. Calhoun, recently
disowned by Yale University for his defense of slavery.

I do not raise these concerns as an apologist for the present
administration. I publicly opposed Trump’s nomination and did not vote for him
(or his opponent) last November. A clever email correspondent spoke for me and
perhaps many others when he asked Nov. 9, “Do the Germans have a word for
‘euphoric dread’?” (They don’t, alas.)

The administration has made decisions and appointments I applaud,
and decisions and appointments I deplore. I often find the rhetoric from the
White House a degradation of what we used to call “the public discourse.” But
that fevered talk has been quite matched by the administration’s opponents in a
public scream-in.

In a volatile situation like this, the task of religious leaders
is not to imitate Alinsky or to mimic Lenin’s strategy of heightening the
contradictions. The task of religious leaders is to call their people to live
citizenship as discipleship, which in this instance means using the arts of
persuasion rather than the anarchic tactics of disruption to do the work of
justice. Discipleship will always involve speaking truth to power. But
Christian discipleship is a matter of speaking that truth and attempting to
persuade others of it, not barking epithets.

Order is fragile. Order is gravely threatened by incivility, from
any source. Whatever their politics — left, right, alt-left or alt-right —
those contributing to that incivility and that assault on order are playing
with fire, which means they’re behaving irresponsibly. Their counsel should be
ignored.

Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E.
Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in
Washington.